“Equisitacae, cryptogamous class of the subspecies of vascular cryptogamous plants,” interjected Friedrich, who had just passed his medical exams.
My style, the Captain said, was immature, or perhaps overripe. It was spiky and thorny, it was undignified and—but he didn’t mean to criticize, he was not a literary scholar, but only a retiree interested in belles lettres. But no doubt about it, the manuscript was neatly typed in triple-space, making the text clear and easy to read, with plenty of room for corrections. His own typescripts, he told us, were an unholy mess; he had a hard time finding things in them, and he had been searching for a long time for someone who could type out clean copy, triple-spaced. He could scrape up the funds for the extra paper, unless his enemy forced him to absent himself from Deyá for long periods of time. Then he reset his monocle at his vacant eye and awaited my reply to his question, formulated so hesitantly as to be unworthy of a professional dive bomber: “Don Vigoleis, would you be willing to become my personal typist?”
When your own efforts go astray, look for success in the work of others. Vigoleis would have no reservations about entering the Captain’s service if he could be told what the gentleman was willing to pay per page.
The retired flyboy said that he had no idea what the going rate on the island was. Perhaps Mr. Emmerich…
Emmerich decided to play King Solomon of Cologne. Two such masterful writers as these, he said turning to our hostess, are surely not going to start picking nits over each other’s work. He could supply paper at a discount. Hurray! And so long, everybody!
No agreement was reached; the case remained undecided. The Captain’s assessment of my style was not far off the mark, but it would have been more accurate to describe it as “cactus style”: it formed branches and offshoots at random, like a cactus with its urge to sprout buds just where you would never expect them. But this occurred to me only later, on the way back home. One more reason to destroy my manuscript.
Robert von Ranke Graves had metamorphosed into an anaconda, hissing at his enemy Martersteig on the public thoroughfare in Deyá. The latter, not yet immune to the British-German venom that was unavoidable on Spanish soil, decided to seek shelter a few weeks longer at the anarchical rooming-house in Palma, and this prompted La Gerstenberg to ask him to be the next to read from his work in progress. After that, she said, he could return to his mountain retreat, and if she ever encountered Graves in the “Alhambra,” she was determined to give him a piece of her mind. This met with a protest from the Captain, who insisted that in true-blue Prussian fashion he was quite able to defend himself. As for reading from his “Monkey Army” manuscript, however, he would be more than happy to be of service.
A week later the Captain mustered his legions of apes in the actress’ apartment. He recited badly. Again and again he lost the thread; it was obvious that his text was badly in need of decent retyping, this time triple-spaced. Nevertheless, what he had to say was well worth listening to. Damn it all! I had not expected the likes of this from the crash-landed fop Martersteig. Page after caustic page, Prussian militarism was castigated here in all its inhumanity, its absurdity, its stupefying emptiness. This was coming from a fellow who knew what he was talking about, and it reached a climax that took my breath away: the monkey battalions parade through the Brandenburg Gate; the German people, unaware that its soldiers in the Kaiser’s uniform are in fact of the simian species, march along in exact rhythm, with shouldered umbrellas. Brehm and his books on the animals of the world were no longer of any use for this work. Protocols of the Teneriffe Chimpanzee Station of the Prussian Academy of Science were creatively exploited here; even a layman could tell that Martersteig’s monkeys behaved as monkeys should. A new Clausewitz was born. The renowned German land of poets, philosophers, and field marshals had brought him forth at a time when the emergency gripping the nation, despite the application of a thousand suction cups, had not been able to suck a single heroic thought out of the country’s citizenry.
“Well—?” The Captain aimed his monocle right at me. What did I think of his style? Was his stylistic amateurism, he asked, getting in the way of his message? Before I could reply, “Hmm…Your style? Very nice, but that’s not the point…,” La Gerstenberg said, “Very nice, if you ask me.” But, she added, she didn’t know much about literature, and nothing at all about military matters.
Herr von Martersteig picked up his manuscript and placed it in a ring binder, closing it with an angry snap. Only then did he send out a somber gaze at his audience. Focusing his monocle on the actress, and speaking in the now familiar barrack-room tonality of his Clausewitzian chimps, he said something like this: “My dear Madam, I am most grateful for your evaluation, which is without question more favorable than I might have heard from the mouth of Vigoleis. ‘Very nice,’ you said. Why not? This is, after all, an opinion—a verdict, and an annihilating one at that. ‘Very nice’—well, well. Then you will now permit me to take my leave…” But before leaving, he asked Vigoleis if he would kindly come to his room for the briefest of discussions of certain technical matters such as a retyping of his “very nice” novel. With that, the mortified Prussian soldier departed from us—not before we noticed his leaving, for he was too lame for that, but a good deal more rapidly than was his wont. A minute later I heard a toilet flushing—aha. Or was he sending his manuscript the way of so many manuscripts? I myself, upon hearing such a verdict from the tragedian, would have ripped up my text in a thousand pieces right in front of her eyes.
La Gerstenberg wondered out loud whether what we had just heard was more than just a pastime for an officer of the air force who had force-landed. “Vigoleis, now you say something!”
“Dear Madame Gerstenberg,” I began, in an attempt to defend my literary colleague, “Martersteig’s style is, as you say, ‘nice.’ You took the word right out of my mouth, but coming from my mouth, it would have meant something different. I would have added, ‘Very nice, indeed, when observed with the eyes of a writer whom you have outpointed, Captain, with your own style. Many people know how to write, but very few have anything to say. You cannot write, but damn it all, you have everything in the world to say.’ The book is superb. Whoever reads it will be rid of any notions about making war. Our neo-Clausewitz will have one thing in common with the New Testament: it will never find its way into a soldier’s musette bag. Yet I fear that hardly a week afer it is published, our friend Martersteig will be the victim of an assassination. Those guys will search him out in his lodgings in Deyá and string him up in the nearest olive tree. He’ll lose his spinal pension, but his royalties for the book will outdo what he could ever squeeze out of Hindenburg.”
How much should I charge him per page? What was the going wage on the island for such secretarial drudgery?
Meanwhile, it was too late in the day for financial negotiations with the author. Strengthened in body and spirit, we made our way homeward—yes, homeward to the Clock Tower, where we now actually felt at home, cosmopolitans that we were. When you come to think of it, if you subtract the naked joy from a house of joy, what you’re left with isn’t necessarily naked misery.
As we hiked out from the city, Beatrice asked me what I really thought of the Captain’s “so-called writing.” She thought that his style was frightful, and the rest insignificant. Bitter thoughts of a failed soldier, one who curses the troops but is offended if you don’t address him with his military rank. I agreed with her on this point, and remarked that the Captain hadn’t yet tossed his medal Pour le Mérite on the dung heap. “Nobody will read that stuff,” Beatrice went on. “It’s just so meaningless.” And then she added, this time in French, that she had been wrong about my taste.
If you’re holding hands as you stride toward a Clock Tower, if you know that just an hour later you’ll have night all around you, if the aroma of the slaughterhouse is coursing over the fields, and rats are scuttling across your path, if the mute stars are skewered on the dull firmament of nothingness like the fearful
many-faceted eye of the Creator—then you don’t tell lies.
And so I said, “Beatrice, chérie, if I can persuade that aviator to fork over fifty centimos for each page of monkey fiction, then I won’t care the gratings of his own green cheese what kind of style this stupid Prussian writes. With his style, he isn’t paying much honor to the officer class he once belonged to. The real Clausewitz, Moltke, Gneisenau—those were first-rate classical stylists, models for anyone who wants to learn how to write good German. It’s just that the things they wrote down on paper don’t interest anybody any more. They don’t interest me; they don’t interest anybody anywhere. What Martersteig has to say will still be meaningful tomorrow. And if you’ll permit me to turn prophetic, it will be meaningful as long as there’s a place called Germany with German soldiers that are all monkeys, from the privates right up through the sergeants and the field marshals. Tomorrow I’m going to start negotiating with him about typing his novel. The author will provide paper and ribbons. I’ll provide the machine and the triple-spacing from my own resources, and…”—lifting my gaze to the stars, although Beatrice didn’t notice—“if my name ain’t Vigoleis, for the first time ever, world-class literature will get written on my Diamant. I hope that Vic van Vriesland will forgive me, and ter Braak and Slauerhoff, too, and all the lesser writers who have constantly been helping me to run away from myself. I’d even do it for 30 centimos, even for a single real, but the Captain doesn’t need to know this.”
Beatrice didn’t need to know that I would do this job for a perra gorda, that is, 10 measly centimos. For a 500-page manuscript, you can figure it out yourself: that would amount to two months’ rent in cash. We would be rid of that worry until year’s end, even considering that Pablo was no longer falling asleep under Beatrice’s pedagogy. It was already close to the end of October.
And so in our nocturnal conversation on the way home, I ended up lying after all, although I meant it only to conceal my real thoughts. But there was no concealing them from the many-faceted, starry eye above us. Now it was that eye’s turn to make a move on the chessboard of our destiny. We were playing black, and we lost.
Negotiating with the writer was a long process. My hopeful suggestion of 50 centimos met with decisive rejection. No, he couldn’t pay me that much. 250 pesetas? Did I realize that a sum that large meant a whole month of hostility from Graves? And, if he might be permitted to inquire, was I crazy? So I started haggling and underbid myself by 10. No! Not the gratings! Another 10. This would still force him to take up a beggar’s staff; not a pretty state of affairs, since, as an officer, he was used to leaning on his ceremonial saber. Besides, it was his enemy who was constantly forcing him to live beyond his means. In the long run, he simply could not afford commuting back and forth to the Count’s redoubt; he rejected the idea of responding, and, in any case, this accursed Tommy was in the stronger position. So in his guts he was pondering final departure from the island to move to Ibiza or Alicante. Should he decide to make the move, and although it was painful even to consider it, he would sell all his belongings, and he had a commode, a “chest” as we might prefer to call it, a masterpiece of cabinetry that he would gladly offer as compensation for my typing. “Madame, dear Madame Beatrice, what a blessing it is that you came along today! You see, your Vigoleis—I like him. He’s a fine man, but he’s not a very practical man. Please, no objections, let’s call a spade a spade. With his metaphysical twists and turns he’s placing obstacles on the path to his own well-being. If you ask me, and I beg your pardon, you will both end up in a barrel.”
“We’re already there, Herr Hauptmann! But now that you have sounded this alarm, permit me to inquire: how far does a Vigoleis have to drop before he’s eligible for a hero’s pension?”
Herr von Martersteig gave me a pitying glance through his monocle, and then continued speaking in his elegant way to Beatrice,
“… and that is why we must be very careful, for Don Vigo might well choose to type out my manuscript for no wage at all, and of that I would not approve!” The Captain made a dismissive gesture that included his fur-slippered feet, which were still a part of his militarily unfit body, though only barely recognizable as such.
He would hate to part with this chest of drawers, a Martersteig heirloom that he had arranged to be sent down from Magdeburg for reasons of nostalgic ambience. He was, he said, a man who clung to the proper environment; he was still unable to get used to Spain. This chest was a piece of the homeland. Vigoleis may go ahead and smile—lucky is the man who can carry his homeland around with him in a little suitcase. He was in need of very special kinds of homey surroundings. Was I able to empathize with that, he asked?
I was indeed. I knew that there are some writers who can write only when they hear a tomcat purring on their laps, one that every now and then will lift its tail to wipe the drops of creative sweat from their brows. Other writers are in need of a woman instead of a cat, a woman who under certain circumstances can relieve them of creative agony along with the sweat. Josef Roth got along with strong liquor; Hemingway takes a complicated bath-cum-massage when he is working. For his struggles with the demons of creativity, Teixeira de Pascoaes requires a few dozen pencil-thin sticks made of precious wood and with little gold feathers at their ends, which he places like over-sized toothpicks in a special quiver. Dante had his Beatrice, and Vigoleis no less. François Villon kept his divine lamp lit by means of highway robbery. Was the Clausewitz of the 20th century likewise using this hunk of antique German furniture, yanking forth from it the energy to animate his four-legged army recruits in a campaign to purge the German nation of its mission to redeem the world?
While describing his armoire, the Captain was overcome with emotion, and we couldn’t help but be moved in turn by every one of his feelings and little delights: exquisite marquetry, hardware of forged metal, an antique lock with a secret mechanism, according to Martersteig’s informants the work of the Nürnberg master-craftsman Hans Ehemann; a warped drawer, one slightly damaged hinge. Vigoleis could take care of that with one blow of a hammer in the anarchist’s workshop. What unrecognized genius would ever refuse to type out the ± 500 pages of his Monkey Army for the price of this masterpiece of a cassone? After just a few weeks, he explained, the item would pass from the Martersteig estate to that of Vigoleis; and, come to think of it, the raised-intarsia family monogram with its “V” as predicate of nobility could henceforth be construed symbolically as a quaint form of parody of the new owner’s initial “V” (pronounced as “F,” to be sure). The Captain closed his melancholy encomium by stating that he was unfortunately unable to produce the heirloom right here before us, but that I should not have the slightest reservations concerning the agreement. Would we care to visit him in Deyá to become convinced of the chest’s value? But now Madame must not look so worried—we would of course be his guests, and as for transportation, he could make the following specific recommendation: by rail as far as Sóller, then over the mountain—“Just a short hike, Vigoleis, I make it easily, even in my lame condition”—down into the next valley, past his enemy’s house, and—
Before he could transform this business trip into a pleasure jaunt, I interrupted him, and surely not without a show of deep emotion on my part:
“Herr Hauptmann, I am at the moment unable to envision the consequences of your practical romantic offer. Thank you very much for the invitation. Even sight unseen, I would have accepted the Martersteig chest as payment, but perhaps I can set you at ease by telling you that we never buy a pig in a poke. So I say, off to Deyá!”
Beatrice replied—not spontaneously, not at all jokingly, but with emotion, as always when the talk came around to travel plans, and missing the correct pitch by a half-tone, and thus making her question sound midway between a request for calm and a reproach: “And the money for the train fare?”
As always, it was a matter of money! No sooner has the soul started ascending like a lark into the twittering blue, than it reaches the end of
its song and plunges back to the fields of common potatoes. If the Dear Lord had created only one fewer species of animal and, as compensation, permitted humankind to produce its own hard cash without resorting to counterfeit, things would go much better from day to day here on earth. But no, He had to go and make insects and vermin in untold millions that defy all attempts at categorization: the bedbug, the common flea, the man-eating flea, beetles with gigantic pincers that no scientists know what to do with—much less the beetles themselves, not to mention millipedes that could easily reach their destination with 30 fewer feet.
And now Vigoleis doesn’t know how we can scrape up train fare. Human history has yet to come up with answers to certain questions, for the simple reason that humans are too shy to ask them. The ostrich is the only animal in Creation that has not mistaken its true reason for existing. It provides human beings with a useful symbol. As for this train fare, here in the presence of an officer of the air force we stand ashamed at lacking an organ that would get us two third-class tickets Palma-Sóller. Every spider is capable of spinning a thread on which it can descend at will, whereas an aviator crash-lands with fatal consequences for his sanity. A caterpillar rolls itself up when it gets tired of its own ugliness, and then soars away with enhanced value as a butterfly, whereas I—but I mustn’t go on with such thoughts; they will cause a darkening of my mood, and besides, this is not the place to pick a bone with the Creator. As a layman in such disputes, I know I would soon lose the argument, and what is more, we would lose sight of the commode on which whole generations of Martersteigs had their diapers changed, in which their crown jewels were stored along with any number of billets doux stemming from domestic dalliances, and finally the Monkey Army. Now, however, this piece of furniture has taken on prime significance for our heroes, probably even greater significance than that hotel-room wardrobe a few chapters ago.
The Island of Second Sight Page 42
